The title: Hanky Panky. The pre-show music: 1920s and 30s standards,
including “My Mammy,” “Swanee,” and “Makin’ Whoopee.” The central set
piece: a bed. If ever a show were setting itself up to be a raucous,
newfangled sex farce, it’s this one at the Midtown International
Theatre Festival. What you get instead are the estranged members of
the Gunther family gathering around the sickbed of their father in the
last 90 minutes of his life, during which time they try to work out
the demons and disagreements that have divided them for decades. Hold
onto your funny bone!

The most concrete problem with Vicki Vodrey’s play, which has been
skillfully directed by Richard Hines, is that it sets up expectations
it has no intention of delivering. For a work in which death is so
prominent, it achieves a startling number of laughs, along with the
expected tears. But even with incredibly detailed characters, smart
structuring, and fantastic performances from almost everyone in the
10-person company, this is a play that is always fighting against
itself. By the final scene, which strives to be searing and slapstick
but ends up as neither, you can’t tell for sure whether it’s won or
lost.

Getting to that point, however, is neither trivial nor a trial, and
Vodrey gets much mileage from investigating how everyone deals with
death. Joe (Rusty Sneary), gay and HIV positive, wants back in the
family without changing his wanton ways. His brothers, Ed and Mike
(Craig Benton and Herman Johansen), don’t see eye to eye on anything,
and are married to women (Jennifer Mays and Cynthia Hyer,
respectively) who don’t mesh well with the family’s constant caustic
outbursts. The men’s sister, Lorraine (Peggy Friesen), is determined
that her father’s final exit will be a godly one. Two members of the
hospital staff, Shelly and Abigail (Diane Bulan and Christina Parke),
experience this all the time; the only religious official on hand is
the non-denominational Reverend Kirby (Evan White), who’s never before
presided over a Catholic death.

In terms of its character layout, and its arguments and their
underlying feelings, the play resembles a lighter-hearted cancer-ward
version of August: Osage County. (Not entirely inappropriate, as this
was apparently the hit of last year’s Kansas City Fringe Festival.)
Vodrey spikes the dialogue with anger and heart in equal measure,
keeping you guessing until the very end whether the Gunthers will work
out all their difficulties. With the exceptions of Hyer and White,
who are a bit shaky in their characterizations, the actors all tinge
ground-level with grief with hope and camaraderie that will be
movingly familiar to anyone who’s ever bonded with loved ones in a
hospital.

But because of a mechanical, manufactured twist that sends unnecessary
tremors of plot down the family’s religious convictions, and a comic
scene surrounding the Last Rites that Abbott and Costello would have
considered over the top, it’s hard to take Hanky Panky as seriously as
it thinks it deserves. For all about it that's good, it ultimately
stumbles because it's more interested in making you laugh then cry
than it is letting you do both at the same time.

As the recent Broadway revival of The Normal Heart proved, AIDS plays
can still pack a punch even though the disease is now a greatly
reduced threat. But one ingredient is key to landing an emotional
uppercut: humanity. And that’s what’s almost entirely missing from
Robert Chionis’s well-intended but cringeworthy one-man musical about
gay New York in the 1980s, Surviving Love.

The story is a typical one. A young gay may moves to Manhattan in the
late 1970s to expand his education and his horizons; falls in love and
then into a relationship with an up-and-coming photographer; and then,
after a decade's long supposedly monogamous relationship, loses him to
AIDS, which he also contracts. Fed up with America’s attitudes, he
moves to the more accepting Germany, where he lives happily ever
after.

But lacking characters, conflict, and cleverness, Chionis's telling is
so oppressively generic that it comes across as cold, cynical, and
borderline heartless. He claims his character (“The Boy”) grew up in
a Midwest town called Nowhere, full of only churches that sustained
your spirit until you were old enough to drink at bars. His lover
(“The Artist”) rarely, if ever, speaks, and we learn nothing about him
beyond his ambition and his frequent dizzy spells. The only
contrasting voice comes from the pianist (Timothy Long) who
participates in uneasy badinage with Chionis and states neon-obvious
morality music with a disconnected intensity that's downright creepy.

Chionis himself is not much better. He cuts an off-putting, almost
ghoulish, stage presence — imagine Liza Minnelli cast as Macheath in The
Threepenny Opera — and his singing voice, though obviously trained, is
ragged and uneasy, and more likely to shove rather than glide its way
through songs. As for the musical numbers, the collection is
contemporary but schizophrenic, comprising existing contributions from
talents as diverse as Brian Lasser, Ricky Ian Gordon, Adam Guettel,
William Finn, and Steven Sater–Duncan Sheik, the latter three
represented by the most unwieldy choices of the evening: “I Love to
Spell,” when The Boy is discovering his high-school intellectualism,
and “Totally Fucked,” which finds him writhing around a pile of boxes
during a hilariously overwrought AIDS episode.

With such an impenetrable star, this 90-minute outing rapidly becomes
endless, and it's bleak and anti-American enough to make The Normal
Heart look like The Producers. That the show premiered in Germany,
where Chionis still lives, may partially account for its aggressive
and pro-European tone, but not for its tendency to treat a drama about
finding and holding on to love (even after death) as if it were a
zombie invasion. If Chionis’s story is indeed about him, he deserves
plaudits for being so open about the difficult life he’s led and
surmounted. But he and his plight would elicit much more sympathy if
Surviving Love didn’t seem like such an endurance test for both him
and for us.